I’ve just returned from a screening of 2 Days in Paris, a comedy written, directed, starring and edited by Julie Delpy of Before Sunrise/Before Sunset fame. Delpy has been very vocal about how her involvement in those Richard Linklater films helped her get funding for Paris. But I wonder if Delpy’s candor isn’t doing her new film a disservice. Earlier today, I read a review of Paris in L Magazine (via GreenCine Daily) which seems to exemplify the general critical reaction to the picture. “The movie suffers terribly of course from the inevitable comparisons to Before Sunrise/Sunset,” writes Benjamin Strong “But in all fairness to Delpy, show me a film that wouldn’t.” With that in mind, I came home from the Paris screening and watched several clips of Sunset on YouTube (cough cough the whole movie’s there in eight parts cough cough), and I think the comparison actually made 2 Days in Paris stand out to me as a more original film.

It’s fair to make comparisons. 2 Days in Paris, like Before Sunset, is a snap shot of relationship between a French woman and an American man, which plays out over the course of a temporary stay Paris. Both films even end with images of Delpy dancing. But whereas the last scene of Sunset (in which Delpy’s Celine channels the spirit of Nina Simone while Ethan Hawke’s Jesse looks on, boggled by her beauty and her shaking booty) typifies that film’s idealization of that relationship, Paris has little use for such golden-hued fantasies of romantic love.

Linklater’s film is a verite-style portrait of a relationship at its most magical (and least sustainable); Delpy’s is an almost Brechtian analysis of what happens to a relationship after that magic hour. It’s far from a perfect film, and in fact at times it feels rather schizophrenic. But somehow, in between fits of broad comedy and Godardian self-referentiality (the first shot of the film even offers a wink at Godard’s “girl and a gun”), Delpy manages to pull off a spot-on portrayal of what it feels like to be in an adult relationship on the brink. It’s certainly messier than Linklater’s tightly-orchestrated symphony of long shots, but to me, the fact you can all but see Delpy’s fingerprints on the screen is extremely appealing.

It’s also fascinating to watch Delpy directly allude to Sunset, as she seems to be doing in the final of scene of Paris, but recast the mood and the situation to fit her own point of view. In Sunset, Linklater draws attention to Delpy’s pale, etheral beauty and sylph-like thinness by putting the actress in a gauzy, backless black blouse, and shooting her slinky dance for Jesse in wide-angle. Celine is clearly performing, but with her body perpendicular to Jesse’s, so that we get the sense that he’s almost spying on her in plain sight. This is classic female objectification–there’s even something slightly creepy about the second-to-last shot of the film, when Hawke, right before breaking into laughter, seems to shift his gaze into a leer. The final shots of 2 Days in Paris have an entirely different feel. I guess it would be a spoiler to go into it here in great detail, but suffice it to say that Delpy (seen here on screen clearly slightly heavier and slightly older, but no less beautiful) takes the opportunity to move away from the fantasy and towards the real.

Above: that final shot of Celine dancing in Before Sunset. You can also watch a brief clip from Paris here, courtesy of indieWIRE.